Data Bootcamp - Final Project

Team Members

Lastname, Firstname - Net ID

Project Overview

The term "video game" was developed to distinguish this class of electronic games that were played to some type of video display. Video games are defined based on their platform, which include arcade games, console games, and personal computer (PC) games. More recently, the industry has expanded onto mobile gaming through smartphones and tablet computers, virtual and augmented reality systems, and remote cloud gaming. Video games are classified into a wide range of genres based on their type of gameplay and purpose.

Since the 2010s, the commercial importance of the video game industry has been increasing. The global market size of the thriving video game industry has more than doubled over the past decade and now easily exceeds one hundred billion dollars.

To help video game developers and publishers alike navigate this fast evolving landscape, Avanmoliam Partners (Avantika, Anmol, & William) provides consulting services to these entities.

The dataset that we have used for our analysis has data scrapped from Video Game Charts, which is a business intelligence and research firm that publishes sales data for video games. The data is further combined with ratings data from Metacritic. Unfortunately, there are some missing observations (which we will be exploring in the data cleaning section) as Metacritic covers only a subset of the gaming platforms in the dataset.

Use Case : Our use case for this data is two-fold:

  1. Advise the Publishers on choosing the best platforms to bring their particular game to market, given the genre and target market-region of the video games they create.
  1. Advise the game publishers on which genre's they should prioritize to diversify their games portfolio.

Importing Python Libraries

Data Loading

Metadata

The dataset include 16 features that are described as follows

  1. Name - The games name
  2. Platform - Platform of the games release (i.e. PC,PS4, etc.)
  3. Year - Year of the game's release
  4. Genre - Genre of the game
  5. Publisher - Publisher of the game
  6. NA_Sales - Sales in North America (in millions)
  7. EU_Sales - Sales in Europe (in millions)
  8. JP_Sales - Sales in Japan (in millions)
  9. Other_Sales - Sales in the rest of the world (in millions)
  10. Global_Sales - Total worldwide sales.
  11. Critic_score - Aggregate score compiled by Metacritic staff
  12. Critic_count - The number of critics used in coming up with the Critic_score
  13. User_score - Score by Metacritic's subscribers
  14. User_count - Number of users who gave the user_score
  15. Developer - Party responsible for creating the game
  16. Rating - The ESRB ratings

Data Cleaning and Filtering

1. Handling NaN/missing values in data

We observe that there is approximately 30% of data missing in features such as Critic_Score, Critic_Count, User_Score and User_Count. This may have been due to a problem in the ETL process or a data collection issue. So inorder to be able to conduct a more precise data analysis we begin with dealing with NAN values .

2. Dropping columns with more that 30% missing data.

3. Removing duplicate values.

4. Altering the existing column datatypes.

Data Exploration and Analysis

Let's begin with looking at the trends in video game sales over the years

Rise-and-Fall : Reviewing the graph above, we see over the past several decades that video game unit sales have risen dramatically when comparing games released in the 1980s to those released into the late 2000s. We see that the late 1990s saw a large increase in the number of games released per year. However, unit sales appear to have peaked in 2008 and have since declined down toward pre-2000 levels. This raises some interesting questions which must be considered:

  1. What led to the explosion in the late 1990s ? We believe that one of the most important changes that occurred during the mid-90's was the transition from raster graphics to 3-D graphics. This gave rise to genres which previously did not exist, like first-person shooter, real-time strategy, and MMO. Consoles such as the first Playstation and Nintendo 64 sold heavily during this time period and ushered in a more modern form of video games, with 3-D graphics and processing that previous consoles were unable to perform. While certainly not exhaustive, other important reasons for the increase in the late 90s include a decline in popularity of arcades and expanded investment by major investors.

  2. What led to the decline starting in the late 2000s? Analysis of the video-game market trends show us that the decline is observed one year after the debut of Apple's iPhone, as mobile gaming has risen in prominence (Android and iOS games are not captured in this dataset).

Additional references : History of Gaming

Observing the trends in video game unit sales across various gaming platforms

Three Shrinking Giants : Viewing things on a platform-specific breakdown in the multi-bar graph above, then looking at the most recent 3 years of the dataset for games released during 2014-2016, we see that Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all experienced steep declines in year-over-year worldwide unit sales, particularly among their most recent generation of non-handheld platforms (e.g. PlayStayion 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Wii).

In fact, Nintendo's Wii by 2016 has actually sunk below Nintendo's handheld platform, the 3Ds, in terms of unit sales. While the 3DS has shown resilience in the face of smartphone gaming market growth, Sony's handheld devices have all but fallen off of the map (with no data even reported for the Sony PSP in 2016). PC sales, a small portion of the market, continue to steadily decrease as well.

To video game developers, this suggests that depending on their skill sets, if they are to invest their efforts anywhere, they may wish to invest less in handheld-oriented games (except perhaps for the 3DS which has held somewhat firm) and less in PC games.

Let's dive deeper and look at top-video game genre with the maximum sales for each year over the past two decades :

A video game genre is a category of games that share similar gameplay characteristics. Video game genres have little to do with the storyline or setting itself, but how the player exists within that world. For example, simulation video gaming places players in a virtual world that mimics aspects of the real world, whereas first-person shooter (FPS) games are usually defined by their first-person perspective and battle-heavy gameplay using long-range weaponry.

From Platforms to Action : The 90s set the ball rolling for all of the games that we play today, no matter what the genre, and it’ll likely be remembered for that reason. Platformers drove the industry in the 90s with games like Super Mario World and Super Mario 64—two of the highest selling games of the decade. The defining consoles for this generation included the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64, one of the last cartridge based consoles in production. Nintendo’s marquee franchise was as popular as ever, and Mario wasn’t all they offered—throw in franchises like Metroid, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Yoshi, and Banjo Kazooie.

Alongside these technological changes, gaming itself evolved and grew. The first-person shooter, real-time strategy, and survival horror genres were all popularized and defined during this time.

Furthermore, as we can observe from the above graph the end of 1990's and early 2000's saw a spike in the popularity of the Action genre. We believe this was largely due to the "3D Revolution" where action games made the transition from 2D and pseudo-3D graphics to real-time 3D polygon graphics. On personal computers, the first-person shooter (FPS) genre was popularized by Doom; it is also considered, despite not using 3D polygons, a major leap forward for three-dimensional environments in action games.

Let's dive deeper into the unit sales breakdown of the top 5 video game genres

Popular gaming genre's : While observing the trends in video game unit sales globally, we noticed that the last five year trends indicate that the top five video game genres are Action, Shooting, Sports, Platform, role-playing- with Action and Shooting games still having a steady hold over the market.

With Doom being a pioneer in the areas of immersive 3D graphics and networked multiplayer gaming, it greatly helped in popularizing the first-person shooter genre. Moreover with games like Call of Duty (2003), Halo (2001) and Fortnite (2017) the action-shooting genre is largely popular among masses.

Total video game units sold globally per genre

Visualizing the % wise market share of each gaming genre:

Global Unit Sales of the Top 10 video games

Popular Video Game Alert :

While looking at the top-games across all regions we observe that Wii sports takes the first place especially with the sales in the North America. Wii Sports is a sports video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Wii video game console. The game was released in North America along with the Wii on November 19, 2006, and was released in Japan, Australia, and Europe the following month.The game is a collection of five sports simulations, designed to demonstrate the motion-sensing capabilities of the Wii Remote. The five sports included are tennis, baseball, bowling, golf and boxing.

Second place is Super Mario Bros. It is a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo. The successor to the 1983 arcade game, Mario Bros., it was released in Japan in 1985 for the Famicom, and in North America and Europe for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985 and 1987 respectively. Players control Mario, or his brother Luigi in the multiplayer mode, as they travel the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Toadstool from the antagonist, Bowser.

Total video game units sold per region :

Sales across geographical regions : When viewing overall video game sales, it is important to understand how specific geographical regions may have different trends. Different countries have significant cultural differences, so this seemingly might translate into the types of video games people play. To get an insight into the regional sales, we plot the total number of units sold across the four regions: namely, the European Union, Japan, North America and Others.

Europe potentially comes across as a big market for games.

Top genre releases over years

Comparing genre with unit sales per year, we see a spike in the action genre starting in the early 2000s. This is likely explainable by the fact that action-based games typically involve significant movement within the game environment, often in the form of shooting or other computationally-expensive actions. Early consoles, which lacked the extensive graphics and 3-D visualization of modern consoles, were not capable of handling the processing needed for action games, which had to wait until the late 90s to take foot. A number of titles in the action genre have developed large followings in the past two decades, including titles such as Halo, Counterstrike, Destiny, or Fortnite, and have ballooned into a sub-industry on their own in which players can earn six-figure incomes by beating other top players in the world.

References : To corroborate our results,we checked out IMDB and saw that most of the top games post 2000 were heavily focussed on Action. Click picture to navigate: imdbbbb

Which are the Top Five Best Action Games?

The Grand Theft Auto franchise is the highest rated in the entire games industry. Unsurprisingly, Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) is the crown jewel in the series and is the most played version of GTA rated by 63% of its fans. With fantastic gameplay and memorable storylines and characters, our analysis finds GTA 5 to be the best selling video game in the action genre.

<img src='https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/271590/capsule_616x353.jpg?t=1618856444', width=500 />

A glance at the game publishers over years :

Video Game Publishers: A video game publisher is a company that publishes video games that have been developed either internally by the publisher or externally by a video game developer. They often finance the development, sometimes by paying a video game developer (the publisher calls this external development) and sometimes by paying an internal staff of developers called a studio. The large video game publishers also distribute the games they publish, while some smaller publishers instead hire distribution companies (or larger video game publishers) to distribute the games they publish.

Nintendo for the Win!

Nintendo Co., Ltd. is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company headquartered in Kyoto. Nintendo is one of the world's largest video game companies by market capitalization, creating some of the best-known and top-selling video game franchises, such as Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Pokémon.

Nintendo has overwhelmingly dominated the market since the early 1980s and has maintained a grip on being the global sales, with Electronic Arts topping them only a handful of years in the 2000s and 2010s. It is interesting to ponder why this is so. Nintendo established themselves early, producing some of the most-played titles in the 1980s, such as Super Mario Brothers or Duck Hunt, and continued this output in the 1990s and 2000s with improved consoles and entirely new concepts, such as the Wii.

Popular video game genres across regions

Through our analysis we have been able to narrow down regionally popular gaming genre's. Let's take a look at the top few:

  1. North America : Action,Shooting and Sports
  2. Europe : Action, Sports
  3. Japan : Role-Playing and Action
  4. Others : Sports and Action

Popular gaming platforms across regions:

Through our analysis we have been able to narrow down regionally popular gaming platforms's. Let's take a look at the top few:

  1. North America : PS2, X360
  2. Europe : PS2,PS3, X360
  3. Japan : DS,PS2,PS3
  4. Others : PS2

Addressing our first usecase, we recommend the publishers to narrow down regionally popular gaming platforms and use them to bring their particular game to market. Different countries have significant cultural differences, so this seemingly might translate to the types of video games they most often play. For instance, we observed that Japanese-made consoles are also most popular in Japan, with the DS and Playstation being made by Nintendo and Sony, both Japanese companies.

Similarly, the XBox 360 is most popular in the U.S., which seems to indicate that consoles created by companies within a particular country may sell better in the same country in which they are based. Japan also differs from other global regions in terms of the most popular games and genre. While action games dominate in the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the world, role-based games dominate in Japan, and the Japanese are the only region with Pokemon in their top three most popular titles. Pokemon belongs to the long-standing Japanese culture of anime, which, while very popular in the rest of the world as well, is not as deeply entrenched in popular culture as it is in Japan.

Therefore we recommend publishers to be mindful of the choosing the appropriate platform regionally to target the local customer base.

Geographical view of video game sales

When viewing overall video game sales, it is important to understand how specific geographical regions may have different trends. Different countries have significant cultural differences, so this seemingly might translate to the types of video games they most often play. The majority of video game producers are centered in two regions of the world: Japan and the US. Consequently, they also constitute two of the largest consumers of video games, with Europe constituting another significant region.

The Console WARS.

The epic battles fought ( and still being fought) amongst the biggest and baddest players in the console gaming industry.

The above graph shows the market share of the different gaming platforms. Sony PS2 is leading with 25.6 % of the total global sales.

The PlayStation 2 was first released in 2000 in response to Sony's hugely popular original PlayStation. In the 20 years since its release, the PS2 has become the best selling video game console of all time. As of September 2020, it had sold almost 158 million units across the world, including over 55 million units in Europe making it the most successful video game console for the living room by a wide margin. As the following chart shows, Sony has been dominating the gaming landscape for the past two and a half decades, claiming four of the top five spots in the gaming hall of fame.

In order to corroborate our data analysis we used the following external References:

  1. Statista.com
  2. Console Sales

Let's take a deeper look into the top gaming platforms and see which genres are popular on each platform:

While both Sony Playstations PS2 and PS3 supported a lot of action games, Wii focussed on Sports and x360 offered more shooter games.

Overall we've observed that Action, Adventure, Sports, and Shooting are four genres that seem to have been there from the beginning, and persist to this day. They have also seemed to fare well on the top gaming platforms.So for our second use case we advise game publishers to focus on these genres if they want to have a low risk portfolio. Furthermore, we've observed that new genre's like role-playing games, puzzles and simulation have also seen significant sales across each of the platforms. Therefore if the game publishers want to diversify their games portfolio, these new genres are definately one's that they should explore.

References: For more information, we recommend exploring the Evolution of Game Genres

Video Games Sales Prediction based on Critic Ratings using Regression

From the correlation matrix, we observe that the strongest correlations are observed between :

  1. The critic score and the Global_Sales
  2. The year of release to the platform

We know that it makes sense for the year of release to be correlated to the platforms, as new gaming platforms are introduced periodically.

So instead of exploring that we tend to dive deeper into exploring the relation between the critic scores and the global sales of video games and see if the sales of games can be predicted based of their ratings.

We make an intersting observation that the slope gets steeper once the 80's. It seems once a game gets a high critic score, every additional point has a higher impact

Focus of our regression analysis : We will use regression to predict whether a game would be a hit(i.e. having sales greater than 1 million) or not based of the Critic Scores.

References

  1. Mobile Gaming Trends
  1. Console Wars
  1. Gaming Genre